First International Conference on Research Methods for Standardized Terminologies 2013 Informatics Methodologist Awards

Dr. David Radosevich received his PhD in Epidemiology and MS in Public Health from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. He also received bachelors degrees in Sociology and Nursing from the University of Iowa. He is an assistant professor in the department of surgery at the University of Minnesota, and where he is also the director of transplant information services. He has provided methodological and analytical support for scientific research using existing transplant information systems and research databases. His work demonstrates skill and expertise in working with large clinical information systems. He encourages and supports students and colleagues in the Academic Health Center, and was critical in securing funding and implementing the organ transplant tracking record at the University of Minnesota and Fairview Medical Center.

Dr. Radosevich has generously analyzed data and/or mentored resarch assistants for seven Omaha System Partnership studies, and provided consultation on many more. He shared a wealth of knowledge in study design, data management, statistical software, methods selection, analysis, report writing, and interpretation. He worked with stakeholders at the Minnesota Department of Health to create the elegant analysis that enabled outcomes benchmarking for pbulic health data. He suggested use of a risk index to stratify clients in comparative models. Dr. Radosevich has given countless hours of consultation time for numerous Omaha System Partnership projects still underway and in development. He encourages and support students, faculty colleagues, and practitioners in using rigorous methods to evaluate important clinical questions.

Award for Early Career Informatics MethodolgistDavid S. Pieczkiewicz

Dr. David Pieczkiewicz received his PhD from the University of Minnesota Institute for Health Informatics in 2007. He came to informatics via anthropology, having received his Master of Arts degree in Biological Anthropology from the University of Kansas and a BA in Anthropology (and Astronomy?) from Case Western Reserve University. He began his informatics career at the Biomedical Informatics Research Center at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation where he was instrumental in establishing the Interactive Clinical Design Institute with Dr. Justin Starrin. Dr. Pieczkiewicz has been an active scholar in the publication of his work including 16 papers and 10 presentations with a variety of collaborators. In addition he has co-authored a book entitled “Data Visualization Strategies for the Electronic Health Record”.

Dr. Pieczkiewcz has always had a passion for investigating the visualization of data as a method of better understanding the phenomena represented by that data. He is attentive to human factors and human needs, and has a strong desire to augment human intellect and decision making. This was reflected in his early work for his dissertation that focused on graphical visualizations of home monitoring data from lung transplant patients in an attempt to improve the clinical decision making regarding their care. That research suggested that data visualization could increase the speed of decision making and resulted in four publications. In addition, he has studied the response patterns of influenza patients participating in a drug study, the satisfaction of clinicians using laptop computers, the development of new methods of understanding the data yielded by the Omaha System.

Award for Student Informatics Methodolgist, PhDMaxim Topaz, RN, MA

Mr. Topaz is a third year PhD student in nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, advised by Dr. Kathryn Bowles. He is also a Fulbright Fellow from the Univeristy of Haifa in Israel. He received his MA in gerontology at the University of Haifa (Israel), Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Science, and his Bachelors in Nursing at the University of Haifa Institute of Technology.

His passion lies in the field of healthcare and nursing informatics, especially standardized ontologies, terminologies, and clinical decision support. He has published in peer reviewed journals, presented at professional conferences, and is actively involved in professional organizations. He began and chairs the Nursing Students’ Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association.

He serves as a contributing editor for the Online Journal of Nursing Informatics. He has numerous projects including collaboration on a homecare Telehealth data analysis project, using generalized estimating equations methods, and best practices for home health care for elderly individuals with chronic diseases.

Together with Dr. Kavita Radhakrishnan, he received a grant from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing entitled Translation of Heart Failure Clinical Practice Guidelines for Home Care Electronic Health Record using Standardized Nursing Terminology (the Omaha System), which Mr. Topaz will describe for us shortly.

Award for Student Informatics Methodolgist, MAEra Kim, BA

Era Kim is a professional information technology architect with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Sookbyung University in Seoul, Korea. She is currently on the informatics team at Medica Research Institute.

She is studying informatics at the University of Minnesota Institute for Health Infomatics master’s program and her advisor is Dr. David Pieczkiewicz. Her research goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of data visualization using Omaha System data.

She has presented her research at professional conferences. Ms. Kim’s advanced database and programming knowledge and skills have delivered high quality data for research, and demonstrated her potential to make significant contributions to research informatics.

Her data visualization accomplishments are notable. In collaboration with Dr. David Pieczkiewicz and research team, she has created streamgraphs to show longitudinal intervention patterns of public health nurses, and sunbursts to show patient problems and signs/symptoms; and evaluated those images for hidden patterns.

She has also employed statistical methods to test hypotheses suggested by patterns in the data. Ms. Kim will describe new developments in her research this afternoon, as well as at the Omaha System International conference.